The patch from user uau that the dpkg maintainer rejected in the
past
has been submitted to the existing bug [2] for completeness (with
permission from the author).
If I remember correctly, Julian Andres Klode was developing a version
of this patch that replaced the hard-coding of the /usr merge with a
more general way to declare "directory A is an alias for directory B"
and have it stored in the dpkg database, so that dpkg has the
mechanism
and some Essential package like init-system-helpers or base-files
could
have the policy, in the hope that this would be more acceptable to
the
dpkg maintainer. Is that code available?
I asked Julian a week ago or so on IRC if he had worked on that patch
at all, and the answer was no. Besides, I think [0] and everything else
make it very evident at this point that the form and function of the
patch attached to the dpkg bug are not really the problem. There are
more fundamental issues of project management and organization at play,
and thus we really do not want those issues to be in the way of the
goal of fully moving to merged-usr.